119th Update

It's been a busy afternoon here iterating, polishing and playtesting a blog post to commemorate Team Fortress' one hundredth update. As often happens, we emerged from thirty minutes of Valve Time, covered with bed sores and sporting full beards, to discover weeks had passed.

In order to celebrate the Update, three Service Medals were introduced:

The Grizzled Veteran – a gold medal awarded to players that bought and played the game within the first three months of its initial release;

The Soldier of Fortune – a silver medal awarded to players that bought and played the game within three months to a year after its initial release;

The Mercenary – a bronze medal awarded to players that bought and played the game more than a year after its initial release.

The aforementioned Service Medals were later supplemented with the Primeval Warrior, which was awarded to players that were involved in the pre-release beta-testing phase of the game. Aside from introducing the Service Medals and fixing various issues, the Update balanced a small number of weapons, and also added a new texture to the game for Crit-a-Cola.

Update progress

The 119th Update was released on April 29, 2010 as planned, however an additional blog entry was posted on May 5, 2010 in order to update the Service Medals. The new patch recognised the players that had been involved with Team Fortress 2 during its original beta-testing phase, and upgraded their medals from Grizzled Veteran to Primeval Warrior. Shortly after the Update was released, the bronze "Weekend Warrior" Service Medal was renamed Mercenary in order to avoid potentially-derogatory phrasing.

Gallery

Hidden pages

Trivia

Written just beside the Soldier in the update page, "For the record you couldn't have done it without us either - Without us you'd still be running around in de_dust. Just sayin'...". de_dust is a map from another popular Valve title, Counter-Strike.

According to Valve, the original plan was to release the Update after 100 patches, however 19 additional updates scheduled for 2008 were released in the interim, resulting in the creation of the 119th Update.

The original name for the Mercenary badge was "Weekend Warrior". However, this was altered post-release.